A Comparison of Maternal Care and Infant Behavior in Japanese-American, American, and Japanese Families.

Caudill, William; Frost, Lois

Previous studies have shown that American mothers, in contrast to Japanese, do more lively chatting to their babies, and that as a result, the American babies have a generally higher level of vocalization and, particularly, they respond with greater amounts of happy vocalization and gross motor activity than do Japanese babies. Thus, it appears that because of different styles of caretaking in the two cultures, by three-to-four months of age the infants have already acquired culturally distinctive behaviors, and that this has happened out of awareness and well before the development of language. This interpretation is challengeable on two grounds: (1) behavioral differences may be genetically determines; and, (2) social change happens within a particular human group, resulting in significant shifts in baby behavior. Comparable data obtained from Japanese-American mothers of the third generation and infants can provide information to help settle both of these arguments. Naturalistic observations were made on two consecutive days during 1961-1964 in the homes of 30 Japanese and 30 white American first-born three-to-four month old infants equally divided by sex and living in intact middle-class urban families. Data on the ordinary daily life of the infant were obtained by time-sampling. The behavior of the Japanese-Americans is apparently closer to that of the Americans than that of the Japanese.(JM)